Feinstein Center to Provide Fellowships for Jewish Archives Research

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The Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University recently announced the creation of the Frederic Fox Memorial Summer Fellowship that will support pre- and post-doctoral researchers' use of the Philadelphia Jewish Archives Collections in the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries.

“The scraps of history collected in this longstanding and much-cherished archive are becoming enlivened again by young researchers who are sculpting the field of American Jewish history,” said Lila Corwin Berman, director of the Feinstein Center.

According to Corwin Berman, the Feinstein Center will offer the fellowship, which was made possible by a donation from philanthropist Robert Fox, to two different researchers over the next two years.

The researchers, the first of whom will begin their fellowship in the summer of 2015, will be chosen through an application process and review by a panel of historians, archivists, and PJAC board members.

The Jewish Exponent recently profiled the Temple University Libraries' digitization initiative to make many documents in the collection more easily accessible to the public. However, due to budget constraints and other stumbling blocks such as copyright laws, not all of the files will become available online and a majority of the information housed at the Temple library can only be accessed in person via good old-fashioned research.

“The aim of the new Fox Fellowship,” said Corwin Berman, “is to make the PJAC collection accessible to young researchers and historians who are engaged in the important work of understanding the American Jewish past."